Author. Writer. Editor. Fool.
If you’re so inclined, check out this nice writeup about me in the Manchester NJ Patch. It covers a bit of my experience growing up in Lakehurst and the writing of Barrens, Blimps & Barons. If you’re not so inclined, check out this great song, especially if you like Queen:
Jim McDevitt, my friend and coauthor of A Year of Hitchcock, just sent me this email: Last night I stumbled across some old MySpace blogs I had written back in 2006-7. On Feb. 24, 2007, I noted that I had finished writing my part of A Year of Hitchcock. If I recall correctly, you finished your part a few days later. Hard to believe it’s been five years. Five years. It really is hard to believe. Things have felt like a whirlwind since. A Year of Hitchcock was my first published book, the culmination of a lifelong dream, and remains something I’m proud of. Others followed. Stuff Every Husband Should Know, the recent Barrens, Blimps & Barons, and contributing to Geek Wisdom, along with two…
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… nothing has been as personally gratifying as the response to my book on Lakehurst. I’ve written about legendary film directors, relationships, geek culture and more, but this is something special to me — and it’s made even more special by the fact that old friends, teachers, people I knew in my youth, their parents, and many others are getting it and are interested in it and are reading it. I’ve gotten random calls at home, emails from people I’ve never met, invitations to do presentations and interviews, requests to sign books for the holidays, and more. Considering I just sort of quietly slipped it out there at the last minute, no adverting or promotion outside this blog and Facebook, the positive response has been…
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If you follow my music blog/archive you may have already seen this, but if not, here is an experiment in sleepy, late-night music I recorded a few months ago but have only just gotten around to tossing out there for people to hear. This album is guitar-free and vocal-free. It’s a sparse record of simple piano, canyon echo drums, cavern bass, and other sounds. Very slow. Methodical. Lots of empty space on this one. Put it on late at night and fall asleep, or early in the morning before you’re ready for music or talk radio. The tracks all flow into one another, so it presents itself as one long piece. (song titles are download links) Tape Theory Day of Turmoil, Night of Regret 1)…
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I’m not much for the whole posting quotes thing, but this quote from Ursula le Guin’s award-winning ‘Those Who Walked Away From Omelas,’ which can be read in full here, strikes me as worth sharing: “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain … But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” In the world of…
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